WASHINGTON — For Sen. Al Franken, the political became personal at a “Saturday Night Live” cast party, of all places.

It was there in New York two years ago that Franken, D-Minn., ran into Lorne Michaels, the creator of the NBC show and his former boss when he was a writer and performer there. Michaels was chatting with Brian Roberts, chief executive of Comcast, which had recently acquired NBCUniversal in a deal Franken opposed.

“I fought to prevent this!” Franken blurted out to the two men.

It was a potentially awkward moment that Franken defused with the kind of blustery humor that delighted audiences during his years as an entertainer. “We all had a laugh, fun was had by all, and I went on,” he said in an interview.

But for Franken, antitrust issues involving big companies are no joking matter. The man who created such famous “Saturday Night Live” characters as self-help guru Stuart Smalley is now a serious policy wonk and a self-made expert in antitrust matters like price-fixing and monopolization.

After a failed attempt to block the Comcast-NBCUniversal merger, Franken again finds himself playing a trustbusting role in Washington — against the same adversary. He has emerged as the leading congressional opponent of Comcast’s $45 billion bid to take over Time Warner Cable, a merger that would unite the nation’s two biggest cable companies.

In a three-hour Senate Judiciary hearing Wednesday, Franken adopted a prosecutorial stance as he interrogated executives from both companies, asking pointed questions, often repeatedly, like a dog with a particularly tasty bone. He was the only lawmaker to explicitly say he wanted the merger blocked.

“We’ve got the biggest cable provider and biggest Internet provider, in Comcast, buying the second-biggest cable provider and third-largest Internet provider, and I’m very worried that will create a company that’s too big,” Franken said in the interview. “They’re going to use their position to leverage higher cable prices and to dictate a lot of things that will make for fewer choices, and their service will be even worse.”

Franken, for his part, should have a good sense of Comcast — he said the company was his provider in both Minnesota and Washington, and added with a laugh: “It’s great. The service is wonderful.” Moments later, he doubled back to explain his tone: His chuckle, he said, “was more ironic than sarcastic.”

Franken, who also opposed the unsuccessful merger of AT&T and T-Mobile, said his interest in the issue was about “trying to protect consumers in Minnesota, trying to protect people whose experience with Comcast has not been good.” He added that when he had asked his constituents to weigh in, he received more than 100,000 replies, overwhelmingly opposed to the deal and talking about “how lousy the customer service was.”

But the issue is also one Franken knows intimately from his time in the entertainment industry. He recalled working in television when the Financial Interest and Syndication Rules, which reined in the power of the networks, were relaxed and ultimately overturned in the 1990s. That allowed networks to own the television they broadcast in prime time, which Franken said “killed independent production.”

“The networks swore up and down that they would not favor their own shows because they said, ‘We want the best ratings,’ ” he said in a phone interview. “That was completely false.”

“LateLine,” a sitcom he helped create, was produced by Paramount, a company NBC did not own, and as a result NBC did not give it a choice slot, in Franken’s view. “Our time slot was not conducive to getting many eyeballs to our show,” he said.

During his performing career, Franken acquired a reputation for tilting heavily against the establishment — and that included the government, the network he worked for and even his own show.

In 1980 he famously took on Fred Silverman, then the NBC chief executive, in a commentary on the Weekend Update segment, calling him “a lame-o” for wrecking the network. Silverman was reportedly enraged by the sketch.

In another well-remembered segment from 1980, he mocked the show’s producers and essentially argued for “SNL” to be canceled — but not until a week later, after he had a chance to be the host. (Because of a writer’s strike, he never was.)

He was known for leading the effort to make sure the writers were paid for every type of replay of “SNL” or the sketches they had written. A colleague from the early years of the show, who asked not to identified because he’d become estranged from Franken, said Franken had been originally hired as a writer at a less than subsistence salary, “and he never forgot that.”

Franken’s deep understanding of — and near obsession with — telecommunications mergers has impressed even those in involved in antitrust debates. Albert A. Foer, president of the American Antitrust Institute, which opposes mergers, still recalls a speech Franken, who is not a lawyer, gave on the subject to the American Bar Association two years ago, calling it “beautiful.”

“As a guy coming from the media, he understands the need for diversity, and as a politician, he understands the need for decentralized power,” Foer said. “He puts these together in a kind of nonpedantic way.”

Franken’s colleagues on the Judiciary Committee, many of whom have law degrees, say that Franken likes to joke, “I’m not a lawyer, but I played one in a sketch.”

It is a punch line that is adaptable to different situations.

“When I speak to prosecutors, I say, ‘I played a defense lawyer,’ ” Franken said, adding with a chuckle and evident satisfaction: “There, I made myself laugh.”

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